Radio Finding New Social Media Resources

I hear it all the time: How can I take shortcuts? I work so much and wear so many hats. Tell me the easy way out. Before you read further, I must say that the easy way out or shortcuts just for the sake of shortcuts rarely add up to more success. The best in any business work smarter, but they don’t take shortcuts just to perform less work. As always, there are a variety of tools you can use in social media. All of them won’t be right for you. The below tools are presented only to jump-start your own thought process that you can source a variety of tools that can work for you.

1. Be your listeners. What are people seeing? How do you keep up? How do you source the hottest topics? Maybe using Storify can be helpful to you. They promise you can use them to find the voices online that matter: “See the best of what people are posting.”

2. ArgyleSocial. Ever wish you could manage everything easier? This is a social media management dashboard built to help you keep moving. Their promise is “publish, engage and measure.” You can check it out here. http://argylesocial.com/

3. If you want to be free to submit your blog or other information to a wide variety of social media and use analytics, history, a scheduler, and more, maybe OnlyWire is for you @ https://www.onlywire.com. They promise you can broadcast and manage your content to the “top 47” social and professional networks. “One button, publish everywhere.”

4. Hubspot promises you can use their software to “create marketing people love” and nurture people through and after engagement. http://www.hubspot.com/

5. Kurrently allows you to monitor your brand, follow live events, find interesting content and generally find out what is hot in social media so your own content is top flight. http://www.kurrently.com/

Social media can be fun, entertaining, useful, and powerful, but you have to choose wisely what your radio station and company want to get out of your social media engagement. I urge you to spend time to focus on what you want and your actual strategic plan to develop the kind of social media that helps you reach actual real goals for your radio station(s). Without a plan, you are largely “winging it.” Once you have a plan, you can begin to look at tools like those in this article and many more. Again, you should determine the tools that are best for you. This article is only a “starter” to get you and your team thinking about how seeking the tools that will work for you to make social media easier, so you can accomplish more of your goals easier in 2013.

Loyd Ford
Americalist1@aol.com

*Content originally appeared @ RadioInk.com. For more content on radio, go to RadioInk.com. Look for my column on social media and radio on the left-hand side of the homepage behind my picture and the word “Engagement.”